Integrating Mental Health In To Primary Health Care

Mental health problems represent 5 of the 10 leading cause of disability worldwide, accounting 12 % of the global disease burden. One in every four people will experience mental health problem during their life-time. More than 450 million people suffer from mental illness. In the world mental health problems are the leading disabling health conditions, due to common mental illness like depression, anxiety, alcohol dependency and drug abuse are mostly leads to chronic medical problems. these mental illness can impair the self-care and social functioning of an individual which directly effects on families The effective treatment are existing but only few of them are access the care because most of the mental health care institutes are located in the cities and town which are far from rural area, the people who are living in the rural areas are not able to access mental health services and they are not aware about the mental health care and they are not ready to seek help for such illness which has social stigma. They are having difficulties in accessibility, affordability for mental health treatments, so for such situation there is need of integration of mental health into primary care. Integration of mental health into primary health care helps to improve access to mental health by avoiding fragmentation of health services by providing both physical and mental health services in primary setting and addressing mental health issues in the primary care are often more attractive for patient and families who are concern about stigma. By using WHO reports, government documents and research studies the present short review will be more focusing on the global mental health burden and history of the mental health in Indian health system and why integration is important in the mental health field and what to integrate and the reasons for integrating mental health into primary health care. Then this review also explains how to build an integration model in primary health care by introducing community mental health model like Bellary Model (District Mental Health Program) SANGHAT and Banyan organization which are working on community mental health, as case study.